Thursday, November 14, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Cabrini Green
Just as lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of Man be in his day. But first he must suffer greatly and be rejected by this generation.
In 1970 Anneke and I lived for a semester in an apartment on North Dearborn St. in Chicago, not far from the offices and classroom of the Urban Studies Program. I’d spent part of the summer of 1968 in Chicago with my friend Larry, attending a conference at the Lutheran School of Theology and then joining the demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention, smelling tear gas and avoiding the billy clubs of the Chicago police.
Larry and I spent the spring semester of 1969 in Europe (Cambridge for me, Reutlingen for Larry). At O’Hare Airport on the way back to the Midwest, I met Anneke (a Valpo exchange student from the Netherlands). She had come to meet other students returning from Europe. Anneke and I spent the summer together and married in the fall.
Walt Reiner and Jody Kretzmann, son of Valpo president OP Kretzmann, had the idea that bringing midwestern university students to the city could help them bridge gaps in their mostly rural and small town experience. I loved that plan and signed right up for the 1970 spring semester. I was ready to bridge some gaps.
The students lived together in several apartments in Chicago’s near north and Uptown, and since Anneke and I were married, we got an apartment to ourselves. We spent time doing Springbok jigsaw puzzles of art we’d seen at the Art Institute of Chicago, listening to Claude Debussy’s “Afternoon of a Faun” and feeling … urbane. Well, urban at least.
Our classes included talks from government spokespeople from the Chicago Housing Authority and Chicago Police Department. Representing the “people,” we listened to and talked with Jeff Fort, leader of the Black P. (Peace) Stone Nation and Marion Stamps, a black community organizer. Black Panther President Fred Hampton had been killed by the FBI and police a month before we began our semester, or we would have heard him too. My fellow Cambridge student Kathe Carino had been in high school with Fred in Maywood, just outside Chicago, just a few years earlier.
Small world.
The lectures and discussions took hold in our young minds. We were gradually becoming educated to the power struggles in the city, and many of us began to take sides. Walt and Jody had their own opinions, but they didn’t want us fighting each other. So they planned a Sunday afternoon field trip to Cabrini-Green, where we brought fried chicken and peach pie (peace pie?) for lunch with Jody’s friend and our class guest Marion Stamps, AKA Mother Marion, Queen of Cabrini.
In 1970, Cabrini-Green Homes, no longer part of Chicago’s skyline in 2024, wasn’t far from our apartment on the Near North Side. Still, it was a world away from our Springbok puzzles and Debussy. The Stamps family apartment was on the twelfth floor. The elevators rarely worked, and we had a little hike to get up there.
In this community named after Saint Frances Cabrini, founder of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and longtime Chicago community hero, 15,000 people lived in ten buildings situated between Chicago’s wealthiest neighborhoods: Lincoln Park and the Gold Coast. The high-rise buildings replaced shanties dating back to 1850 (where first Swedish immigrants, then Irish, Italian and Sicilian (Little Sicily nicknamed Little Hell because of nearby noxious gas and shooting flames from a nearby gas refinery). Gradually the population became almost entirely black African-Americans, and their living quarters weren’t shanties, but …
Wikipedia’s article pulls no punches:
Design decisions made the towers extremely unpleasant and unappealing places to live. Rather than interior hallways, units in many of the later-phase buildings were accessed via exterior walkways made of bare concrete and enclosed with chain-link fencing. This meant that residents would be exposed to the elements any time they left their units to go to other sections of the building, a dangerous prospect during Chicago’s severely cold winters.
Gang members and other vandals covered interior walls with graffiti and damaged doors, windows, and elevators. Rat and cockroach infestations were commonplace. Rotting garbage clogged trash chutes (it once piled up to the 15th floor), and basic utilities (water, electricity, etc.) often malfunctioned and were left in disrepair.
On the exterior, boarded-up windows, burned-out areas of the façade, and pavement instead of green space—all in the name of economizing on maintenance—created an atmosphere of decay and government neglect. The balconies were fenced in to prevent residents from emptying garbage cans into the yard, and from falling or being thrown to their deaths. This created the appearance of a large prison tier, or of animal cages, which further enraged community leaders of the residents.
As you can imagine, no one wanted to go into that environment unless they had to. Police avoided it, maintenance people refused to take calls or do the needed work – only pastors and women like Ms. Stamps (and Sr. Cabrini if she’d been alive) were willing, often taking their lives in their hands, trusting God.
The Lord secures justice for the oppressed, gives food to the hungry. The Lord raises up those who were bowed down. The Lord protects strangers, and sustains the fatherless and the widow.
So our trip there, innocents that we were, meant a great deal to us, and even more perhaps to those observing us (mostly white, mostly young) as we trooped up the stairs and down the halls to this fine black family’s apartment, sitting on the floor, talking, listening to her stories, playing with her kiddos, and then trooping down again. Back to our different world, understanding more of our own white privilege, more and more thankful.
I have experienced much joy and encouragement from your love, because the hearts of the holy ones have been refreshed by you, my God. The Lord shall reign forever.
This semester, and especially this spring Sunday, changed my life.
(Philemon, Psalm 146, John 15, Luke 17)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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